Friends in Need When Nature Hiccups, Natural Disasters forum Options

[belleraphon1]

Sincerely hope all you UMSFers on the West Coast are OK! Read Emily's blog....
http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00001576/

Widfires and now an earthquake... scary...

Concern from an Ohioan who only worries about getting snowed in once or twice a winter season.

Craig

p.s. With global climate change this forum may get a few posts or two in this century!

[nprev]

Yes, you do!!! Give it up, big guy!

[ElkGroveDan]

Yes, you do!!! Give it up, big guy!

My wife and I had just moved into a new rental house in Northridge, California in 1994 right before our first baby was due. She was due Tuesday January 18th, but since she was breach the doctor decided to due a C-section the Wednesday before at the hospital near my wife's work, Glendale/Verdugo just 15 minutes down the 118 Freeway. So they finally kicked us out of the hospital Friday night and I was terrified that this fragile little baby was now our responsibility. I spent the weekend fussing around the two of them until Sunday night Allison finally told me to get lost and get some fresh air. So I went over to the Northridge Mall a few blocks from our home and browsed new baby cribs since we were just borrowing one to get started. I wandered around a department store called Bullocks and at closing time I was the last one out as they locked the doors behind me - in fact it would later turn out that I was the last customer to ever shop in that store. Monday was a holiday for me so I stayed up late with Allison watching TV and trying to get used to this whole idea of being a parent. We went to bed around midnight.

Around 2:00 she woke us up crying and Allison nursed her back to sleep. Then again around 4:00. Shortly after that, (I still remember the clock said 4:26) she woke up crying again. Allison said "She can't be hungry I just fed her. So I said, "well maybe its the diaper. Now is as good a time as any for me to figure this out. You stay in bed". So we were among the very few who had the lights on at that hour. There was nothing wrong with the diaper so I began to discuss with Allison whether or not to put a new one on. As I was standing there (4:31) I felt a really smooth rocking swell cross the house the way a small wave goes under a boat on a calm lake. I can still hear my words to this day. I said out loud "Funny that kind of felt like an earth...." and I never finished the sentence. It felt like a truck hit the house. I saw everything twist and fall and fly through the air and the lights went out as I reached down and scooped up the baby off the bed. As I took three giant steps to the bathroom doorway I could feel my knees hit the floor between bounces. The roar and the noise was deafening as everything in the house that could break broke at once. I held onto the doorway with one arm and the baby with the other as that house rocked back and forth like a martini shaker. I was only five or six feet away from Allison who was screaming "Where's the baby!!?" and the roar was so loud she couldn't hear my shout back that I had her. Allison landed knee first into a picture frame and sliced open her knee. When the first round of shaking stopped I let go of the wall and pulled her up next to me and then the shaking began again.

When the shaking seemed to stop we stood there in the pitch black half naked and in bare feet with devastation all around us. Then all of a sudden BANG! and crash, a window had popped out of its twisted aluminum frame and fallen out into the back yard, then bang, bang bang more windows kept popping out. I told her to stay put while I went to get a flashlight. Three times I started down the hall and three times the shaking resumed and I would go running back to hold them. When I finally did make it to the kitchen to find the flashlight I stepped on broken glass that darn near sliced my toe off. When I finally made it back to Allison we started looking for clothing so we could get outside - it was really cold even for Los Angeles that morning, like the low 40s or so. A neighbor came pounding on our door since by then everyone on the street was outside except for us. I grabbed a dozen or so blankets and we finally went out to the car and I started it up and put on the heater. The rocking back and forth in the car continued until sunup and then for the next several days. I tried to take Allison to the hospital to get her knee stitched (and my toe) later that morning but the place was a zoo and we were worried about having a newborn baby around all those crowds and confusion. So we spent the next night in our Ford Bronco SUV with the dog and the cat. The next morning it took something like three hours to make the normally 20 minute drive to Burbank airport. I put Allison and the baby on a plane to San Francisco where her mother lived and I didn't see them for the next three weeks as I worked to make the house livable again. In hindsight I think of how lucky we were that the baby was delivered when she was. That morning the 118 freeway that I would have taken to the maternity hospital collapsed about 20 feet. Several people drove over the edge in the dark, one was killed. The department store I had been in the night before crumpled completely in half and a custodian was crushed under a parking structure there. An apartment building a half mile down the street from us collapsed and 17 people were killed. I think ultimately 57 people were killed that morning by the Northridge earthquake. Everything we owned that could break, did break with the exception of our wedding china which was still packed in boxes from our recent move.

I can't seem to find any scanned pictures from that week (I have them somewhere but its mostly a memory I try to forget), but here's what the baby and I looked like the day before.

Attached thumbnail(s)